We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. An active court can improve on the outcome...

This paper studies the correlation and volatilities of the bond and stock markets in a regime- switching bivariate GARCH model. We extend the univariate Markov-Switching GARCH of Haas, Mittnik and Paolella (2004) into a bivariate Markov-switching GARCH model with Conditional Constant Correlation...

Under rational expectations and efficient markets, the news contained in public information announcements is directly impounded into prices with there being no role for trades in this process of information assimilation. This paper directly tests this assertion using transaction level exchange...

This paper develops a theory of the opening and dynamic development of a futures market with competing exchanges. The optimal contract design involves a trade-o¤ between the hedging potential of a contract and it's degree of substitution with competing contracts. As design costs go down slowly,...

We consider performance measurement and evaluation for managed funds. Similarities and differences−both in econometric practice and in interpretation of outcomes of empirical tests−between performance measurement and conventional asset pricing models are analyzed. We also discuss how...

This paper explores the potential for violations of VaR subadditivity both theoretically and by simulations, and finds that for most practical applications VaR is subadditive. Hence, there is no reason to choose a more complicated risk measure than VaR, solely for reasons of coherence.

We propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the extended Kolmogorov- Smirnov tests of Stochastic Dominance of arbitrary order in the general K-prospect case. We allow for the observations to be serially dependent and, for the first time, we can accommodate general dependence...

The classical doctrine of the Lender of Last Resort, elaborated by Thornton (1802) and Bagehot (1873), asserts that the Central Bank should lend to “illiquid but solvent” banks under certain conditions. Several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete: when interbank markets are...

We model the term structure of interest rates as resulting from the interaction between investor clienteles with preferences for specific maturities and risk-averse arbitrageurs. Because arbitrageurs are risk averse, shocks to clienteles’ demand for bonds affect the term structure— and...

In this paper we propose an estimation method for two classes of semiparametric scalar diffusion models driven by a Brownian motion: In the first class, only the diffusion term is parameterised while the drift is unspecified; in the second, the drift term is specified while the diffusion term is...